Critique 4 – Hypnosis
Critique: “And while some people can be hypnotized, it’s absurd to hypothesize an entire population going about in that manner, outside of a zombie film.”
Response: Here Robinson is confusing Jaynes’s discussion of hypnosis as a vestige of the bicameral mind, and instead equating it with the bicameral mind. This is just poor scholarship or reading comprehension on his part. Jaynes never suggests that people in bicameral civilizations were living in a hypnotized state. I have already covered this misconception on the “Myths vs. Facts” page. Jaynes discusses hypnosis to illustrate that consciousness can be easily altered through language (and thus is likely to be a cultural and not a biological adaptation), and that we seem predisposed to relinquish control to an external, guiding voice (“the relationship of subject to operator in hypnosis is a vestige of an earlier relationship to a bicameral voice”). For more on this subject, and an expansion of Jaynes’s evidence that hypnosis is a vestige of the bicameral mind, see my article, “Hypnosis as a Vestige of the Bicameral Mind” in Contemporary Hypnosis (Vol. 29, Issue 3).
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.